erver or a
passing traveller might take just the opposite view of her tendencies.
The stranger who should complete a cycle of sumptuous suppers in
Providence, or spend but a day or two in Newport at the height of the
season, might conclude that Matter with its most substantial appliances,
or Fashion with her most fascinating excitements, had combined to
exclude all thoughts of the spiritual from the few square miles over
which this least of the States holds dominion. Should he leave the two
capitals of luxurious wealth and giddy fashion and seek for the haunts
of Philosophy among the quiet nooks which her few valleys and her
splendid sea-coast afford, he might judge that meditation had been
effectually frightened from them all, for nowhere can he escape the whir
of countless spindles and the clash of thousands of looms.

But inferences like these may not be trusted, as history demonstrates.
The most admirable of modern treatises in the subtile science, that
masterpiece of speculation in matter and style, "The Minute Philosopher"
of Bishop Berkeley, was composed in Rhode Island, and the place is still
indicated where the musing metaphysician is said to have written the
greater portion of the work. That Berkeley's genius did not abandon the
region, when he left it, is manifest from the direction taken by the
late Judge Durfee, whose "Pan-Idea," if it cannot be accepted as in all
respects a satisfactory theory of the relations of the spiritual
universe, may be safely taken as an indication of the lofty and daring
Platonism of the ingenious author. The anonymous author of "Language by
a Heteroscian" is another thinker of somewhat similar tastes. If common
report do not greatly err, it is the same thinker who in the volume
before us solicits the attention of the philosophic world to his views
of the Will. It adds greatly to the interest of the volume itself, in
our view, and we trust will do so in the view of our readers, to know
that he is no studious recluse nor professional philosopher, but active,
shrewd, and keen-sighted, both in his mills, when at home in a fitly
named valley, and upon Change, when in Boston or New York.

Surely Roger Williams, that boldest of idealists, did not live in vain,
in that he not only set apart the State which he founded as a place of
refuge for all persons given to free and daring speculation, but made it
a kind of Prospero's Isle, that should never cease to be haunted by some
metaphysical